In the very year that he died the new city had progressed so well that its chief architect, Laparelli, could afford to apply to the Pope for leave to return to Italy. While La Valette was succeeded as Grand Master by an Italian, Pietro del Monte (as enthusiastic about the whole project as the founder himself), Laparelli’s place was taken by his talented Maltese assistant, Gerolamo Cassar. Cassar was the first of a long line of Maltese architects who were to embellish their island not only with the dignity of fortresses but with some of the most superb baroque architecture to be found anywhere in Europe. The restraint imposed by the limestone blocks, coupled with the skill of the native stone masons, gave Maltese baroque a dignified austerity not to be found in other lands. The city which was to dominate not only Grand Harbour and Marsamuscetto but the whole island and the imagination of many travellers in the years to come was based on the mathematical grid principle that had first been evolved in ancient Greece. This system could in some places lead to a rather heartless rigidity, but Valetta was redeemed from this by the fact that, although it had been the original intention to level off the top of Mount Sciberras, the tools, the labour and the money were not available. The result was that the rectangular street pattern was enlivened by a series of dips and rises, with always—as one looked east towards Fort St Elmo at the end—a prospect of the Mediterranean framed between palaces, houses, or the Auberges of the Knights. On the landward side, the only side from which any real attack could come, the city was divided from the slope beyond by a massive ditch cut in the sheer limestone. It has been claimed as the largest man-made ditch in the world.
As Quentin Hughes describes Valetta in The Building of Malta:
The plan of the city provided for a rectangular pattern of streets, running along and across the peninsula, twelve in the length and nine in the breadth, excluding the perimeter track. The main street ran from the gate of St George…direct to the gate of Fort St Elmo: there the axis of the fort turned more to the north. The principal square of Valetta was placed about half-way between the main gate and the fort, and another square opened off the south side of the street in which the Conventual church was built…Valetta differed from the two previous capitals of the Order in three major respects. The new city was laid out on a rectangular grid pattern. The idea of having a citadel containing the Magistral palace, capable of making a final stand, was abandoned, and instead the palace was built in the city. The Collachio, an area set aside for the exclusive privileges of the Knights and in which all the public buildings of the Order were situated, was not used in the new city and the auberges of the Knights were dispersed throughout Valetta, each being built near the bastion defended by its respective Langue.
Over the centuries, as the prospect of being besieged receded ever further into the realms of improbability, what had begun as an austere fortress-city became embellished with innumerable private buildings of strength and dignity, largely styled in that Maltese baroque which is florid without ever being over-ornate. This was the city that for nearly two centuries was to be the home and headquarters of the Order of St John. Here they would establish their Great Hospital, which would be the envy of Europe for its size, its design, for its medical proficiency and for the conditions available for the treatment of patients. Here in Valetta, as it became more and more a worldly capital, the austerity of that military-monastic life which the Knights had known in Birgu and Rhodes and under the hot skies of Syria and the Holy Land would gradually yield to an increasingly secular form of existence. The pomps and ceremonies of a miniature European court would gradually conceal from view the original ideals of their founder, Brother Gerard. Yet, even in their days of ease, the Knights could never look across Grand Harbour at the frowning grandeur of Fort St Angelo without being reminded of the Great Siege, and of the fact that the continued existence of the Order stemmed directly from the terrible summer of 1565.
Chapter 23
LEPANTO AND MALTA
Six years after the siege of Malta the Knights could for the first time feel assured that, although much remained to be done, they had in Valetta a city which could successfully resist any further siege. The opportunity now occurred for a major stroke against the Turkish fleet in its home waters. In the famous battle of Lepanto that followed in 1571, the navy of the Order was only represented by three galleys. This was due to the fact that they had recently suffered a major disaster—rare in the Order’s history—when the general of the galleys, Saint-Clement, in command of four transports had been overhauled by the Algerian corsair Ochiali. Saint-Clement had lost three of his vessels in an action in which it would appear that he had not only broken his vows but took to his heels in the face of the enemy.
On arrival in Malta Saint-Clement was brought to trial, found guilty of cowardice, and stripped of his habit. So great was the popular indignation against him that he was handed over to the civil authorities for punishment. (It was not within the jurisdiction of the Order to condemn one of its members to death.) Saint-Clement was strangled, his body put in a sack, and thrown into the sea off Malta. Ochiali, the victor of this engagement, was an Italian from Calabria, one of the many renegades who contributed to the success of the Moslems at sea during this period in history. He had learned his trade under the formidable Barbarossa and he himself was more than an adequate match for most Christians. Ochiali was undoubtedly one of the best commanders afloat.
The Order of St John was completely right to try the unfortunate Saint-Clement and to expel him. In view of the smallness of the Knights’ fleet the whole of their reputation rested upon the fact that it was more efficient than any other, and that the Knights and the men aboard it would always fight to the death rather than surrender. On an earlier occasion, summoned before the Sultan Suleiman prior to the siege of Malta, a Turkish sea captain had said of the Knights: ‘Their vessels are not like others. They have always aboard them great numbers of arquebusiers and of knights who are dedicated to fight to the death. There has never been an occasion when they have attacked one of our ships that they have not either sunk it, or captured it.’ If the Knights had lost this reputation—if they had not constantly justified it—then their time in Malta would have been short indeed.
The combination of European naval forces that brought the Turkish fleet to battle off Lepanto was led by Don John of Austria, the natural son of Charles V. His command consisted of the Spanish Mediterranean fleet, a squadron from the Papal States, the Order’s three galleys, and two squadrons from Genoa and Venice. Altogether the allies mustered six galleasses, 212 galleys, and twenty-four large sailing transports. The largest contingent was provided by Venice—the six galleasses, 107 galleys, and two of the transports. Venice’s interest in the Aegean and the Levant was, as always, the preservation of her trade route with the East. But on this occasion the Venetians had more at stake than usual, for the Turks were engaged in trying to annex that Venetian preserve, the great island of Cyprus. And without Cyprus Venice was well aware that most of her interests in the East would founder. The Knights would always fight the Moslems anywhere they could be found, and as for the other states—particularly Spain—it was to their mutual interest to keep the Turks out of the central and western Mediterranean. One crushing victory, it was felt, would clear the sea of the Turkish menace and, without the power of the Ottomans to back them, the corsairs of North Africa could soon be dealt with. Pope Pius V had been largely instrumental in welding the coalition together, but even so it was always something of an uneasy alliance. As Admiral Ubaldini has commented in his history of the Order’s navy:
Although the types of ships involved were well balanced one with another, there was no such homogeneity among the allies. Jealousy, misunderstandings about matters of precedence, mutual reproaches, and facile resentments—all these made themselves only too plainly evident while the fleet was still assembling at Messina. It was only due to the warm understanding between Don John of Austria and Marcantonio Colonna that the Christians were able to reconcile their differ
ences and acquire a uniformity of purpose sufficient to confront the power of the Turk with any kind of confidence.
On September 16th, 1571, the combined fleet moved across the Ionian Sea to the island of Corfu. It was not until October 7th that the great engagement between East and West took place in the narrows of the Gulf of Patras, just off the small port of Lepanto. The Turkish fleet consisted of 250 galleys, backed up by a number of smaller sailing craft and oared vessels. The great significance of Lepanto was that it was the last action in history in which the oared galley predominated. For thousands of years, since Greek had fought Persian, and Roman had fought Carthaginian, the naval history of this sea had been dominated by the galley. It was fitting somehow that it should end in a contest worthy of the innumerable other great sea-battles that had been fought and determined by the muscle-power of men.
The Turks were drawn up in an excellent defensive position that forced the allies to deploy round the northern headland at the mouth of the narrows. But, despite initial tactical success, they failed to take adequate advantage of it. Before long the impetuous advance of the allies had begun to shatter the Turkish centre. The Ottoman flagship, the great galley of Ali Pasha, was taken by storm. As Don John of Austria was to report in his account of the action:
The fighting on the galley went on for a whole hour. Twice our forces reached the mainmast of the Turkish ship, only to be forced back again by Moslem charges which drove our men back to the forepart of our own vessel… But after an hour and a half God granted us the victory, and the Pasha as well as five hundred other Turks were captured. His flags and his standards were taken and the Cross hoisted to the mainmast. Don John caused the cry of victory to be raised.
Among those serving aboard the Spanish vessel Marquesa in this action was Miguel de Cervantes, the future author of Don Quixote. Wounded twice in the chest by gunshot, he was also maimed in his left hand—‘for the greater glory of his right’ as he put it later.
The three galleys of the Order of St John had been given the honour of holding the extremity of the right wing, a position which was soon attacked by a squadron under the command of El Louck Ali, Viceroy of Algiers. Although heavily outnumbered the Knights fought with their usual gallantry. One account of the action describes how:
The Knights and their men defended themselves with a valour worthy of their heroic Order. A youth named Bernadino de Heredia, son of the Count of Fuentes, signally distinguished himself, and a Zaragozan knight, Geronimo Ramires, although riddled with arrows like another St Sebastian, fought with such desperation that none of the Algerine boarders cared to approach him until they saw that he was dead. A knight of Burgundy leaped alone into one of the enemy’s galleys, killed four Turks, and defended himself until overpowered by numbers.
One of the Order’s galleys was captured and was being towed away as a prize when a counter-attack forced El Louck Ali to abandon it. On board it the rescuers found three survivors, two Knights senseless from their wounds, and the Prior who had five arrows in his body. Around these three lay the bodies of other Knights, men-at-arms, and seamen, together with 300 Turks who had been killed while trying to seize the galley.
By the close of day it was clear that the Battle of Lepanto was destined to go down in history as a great Christian victory. Only El Louck Ali, who had nearly driven in the right wing of Don John’s fleet, managed to extricate himself with honour. When the centre of the Turkish fleet collapsed under the weight of the Christian attack, El Louck Ali, whose position had now become untenable, managed to withdraw his squadron successfully to escape ‘to fight another day’. Elsewhere the Turkish losses were enormous—fifty ships burnt or captured and as many as 20,000 men killed or taken prisoner. The allies for their part lost 8,000 dead and almost twice as many wounded. A most important outcome of the battle was the release of tens of thousands of Christian slaves from the oar-benches of the Ottoman fleet.
Lepanto was rightly celebrated throughout Europe as an outstanding victory—the greatest that had ever been achieved over the Turks at sea. The victories of Lepanto and Malta were seen throughout Europe as a sign that the hitherto irresistible force of the Turks was contained. It is certainly true that, after these two famous actions, the Ottoman navy was never again used in force in any attempt to break into the western Mediterranean or invade Europe itself. On the other hand, as Moritz Brosch has pointed out in The Cambridge Modern History:
The Battle of Lepanto proved the superiority of Christian arms, its results that of Turkish diplomacy… The maintenance of this position was facilitated by the divisions, nay hostility, which broke out not only between the cabinets of the three allies, but between the crews of the different nationalities, which had united to win the victory but went asunder over the division of the spoil.
It is undoubtedly a fact that even at this moment of victory the allies could not reconcile their differences. As Marcantonio Colonna, the commander of the papal squadron and the man who in company with Don John had managed to unify the fleet sufficiently to get it to Lepanto at all, was to write in a despatch: ‘Only by a miracle and the great goodness of God was it possible for us to fight such a battle. But it is just as great a miracle that the prevailing greed and covetousness have not flung us one against the other in a second battle.’
The Battle of Lepanto, the victory of Don John of Austria, has often enough been celebrated in European history. It was hailed at the time in such extravagant terms that the people of western Europe might well have believed that the power of the Turk—at any rate at sea—was extinguished for ever. Even as late as the nineteenth century a historian could write that, ‘The results of the victory were so great that for many years the naval power of the Turks in the Mediterranean was almost annihilated.’ Later research has shown that this was certainly not the case. Only three years after Lepanto the Ottoman navy sailed down unopposed and reoccupied Tunis, out of which Barbarossa had been driven by Charles V. The fleet was under the same El Louck Ali, who had already proved his ability at Lepanto, and it numbered no less than 150 vessels—all of them brand new. The Ottoman Empire was rich enough in money, men, and timber to make good its losses in a way that astounded the princes of Europe. The French ambassador in Constantinople wrote at the time in a despatch to France, ‘I could never have believed that this monarchy was so great, had I not witnessed it with my own eyes.’
Lepanto was certainly a victory, and one in which the Knights of St John could take a justifiable pride since their three galleys had sustained the attack of the ablest Moslem seaman afloat They had managed to hold the crucial right wing of the fleet at the moment when Don John was breaking through the Turkish centre. Lepanto did not mean, however, that the central basin of the Mediterranean was cleared of the enemy. On the contrary, the new Turkish occupation of Tunis meant that the Knights’ caravans out of Malta were to become even more necessary. If Southern Italy, Sardinia, Sicily, and indeed Malta itself, were to be secured against the corsairs from the Barbary coast, then it was the duty of the Order—the sole policeman of the area—to ensure that the corsairs were not only contained but put on the defensive. Great battles, great sieges, these are remembered by historians, but the steady year by year ‘police work’ carried out by the Order of St John during the century and more after the battle of Lepanto is often only too easily forgotten.
One of the most important events in the Order’s history during their Maltese years occurred in the late sixteenth century during the rule of Grand Master La Cassière. A proud, arrogant, and obstinate man, he had shown himself a brave and capable commander, but the nuances of island politics were beyond his comprehension or capability to deal with. He offended the Maltese in many ways, not least through his dislike (which he did not bother to conceal) of the local Maltese bishop. There had always been a potential source of friction between the islanders’ elected bishop and the Grand Master who, as head of this great religious Order, considered himself the equal of a cardinal. All this came to a head under La Cas
sière, and it ended—after his appealing to the Pope against the bishop—in the establishment in Malta of a member of the Inquisition. The latter was an extremely important figure in the time of the Counter-Reformation. To the Grand Masters he was almost inevitably an odious one, since he was responsible only to the Pope. He constituted, therefore, a third form of authority in the island. The Maltese, who had learned over the centuries how to exist under one foreign overlord after another—Carthaginian, Roman, Byzantine, Arab, Norman, Siculo-Spanish, and now the Order of St John—were quite devious enough by nature, without having the peculiar cat’s cradle of their island’s secular-cum-religious politics complicated any further. The Knights, with their aristocratic and arrogant attitude towards their largely peasant subjects, were hardly likely to be tolerant towards the intervention of the Pope (through his grand inquisitor) in the affairs of their island. The result was that in this trinity of interests—at the head of which stood the Grand Master—there was ample scope during the years to come for every possible kind of petty jealousy, political and religious in-fighting, and Machiavellian intrigue. The arrival of the Inquisition in Malta was an unhappy occasion for the island.
In one sense the most important event during this period was the building of the Conventual cathedral of St John the Baptist in Valetta. It is one of the great buildings of southern Europe, and one of the greatest architectural monuments of the Order. Built during the grandmastership of La Cassière to the design and under the supervision of Gerolamo Cassar, the cathedral was completed in 1578. Outwardly it is austere—a fortress of the Faith—designed in the Mannerist style. Inside, it is one of the great Baroque buildings of the world, and successive Grand Masters and other members of the Order spent fortunes upon its side chapels, upon their monuments of marble, and upon the treasury of the church which was constantly being enriched by gifts from all over Europe. As the decades passed, so the whole floor of St John’s became a monument in coloured marbles to the noble houses of Europe whose sons had died in the Order’s service. Each Langue had its own side chapel, and here as elsewhere there was inevitable competition between the Langues, each eager to make its own chapel the richest and the most decorative. At a later date the Spanish Cotoner brothers secured the services of the Calabrian Mattia Preti to paint frescoes for St John’s: frescoes which Sir Osbert Sitwell described as ‘one of the finest decorative exploits of Baroque painting’. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, Grand Master Perellos enriched the church with twenty-eight magnificent Flemish tapestries, woven in Brussels and based on cartoons by Rubens. The austerity of the cathedral’s exterior served like an iron-bound treasure chest to protect and conceal the sudden explosion of light, colour and richness that met the eye inside. St John’s shows, as it were, the two faces of the Order; the military dedication of purpose and the aristocratic love of the sumptuous.
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